fcd

(F)ast (C)hange (D)irectory for bash shells avoiding a lot of aliases.

Summary

I'm a lazy person by nature. If I have to repeat a task multiple times I immediately starts to think how I can automate this boring task. One of these tasks are when you work in a bash shell and starts to change directory to frequently used directories. You start to type the same cd commands over and over again, normally followed by an ls, ls -la or ll command, right? These commands are repeated a lot during a normal working day.

After a while you create an alias for these and drops them into your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_aliases files and when its done the list of aliases will continuously grow and never get cleaned up.

So, are you tired of adding aliases for frequently visited directories? Tired of searching through your aliases or other configuration file to find out how you named that smart shortcut?

fcd is a solution for that. The benefit of fcd is to replace tedious aliases which are cumbersome to create, update and delete when you would like to create shortcuts to frequent visited directories.

fcd behaves similar to a cd <path> alias and it will also support adding extra commands after the change directory have taken place to be able to tailor the behavior. If you have forgotten the shortcut name you created for a specific alias the script supports a listing function of all created aliases, it even have tab completion support.

Installation and setup

You have two options

Option 1: Run the provided install.sh script which will create needed bin directory in the users home if it doesn't exists, copying all needed files to the bin, updating the $PATH environment if needed and finally creating some supporting shortcut aliases. Logout & login and you are ready to go.

Option 2: Do it manually and this is just a proposal of setup and you can of course tailor it according to your own preferences.

1. If you don't have a bin directory in your $HOME directory, create one: mkdir ~/bin

2. Check if ~/bin is included in your $PATH environment: echo $PATH

3. If it's not, include the path to ~/bin into your $PATH environment. It might vary which configuration file you have to update dependent on your linux distribution and setup. When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile in that order. Example: PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"

4. Copy fcd.py, fcd.sh, README.md and LICENSE to your ~/bin directory.

5. The scripts needs to be executable and if needed change the execution flags chmod u+x ~/bin/fcd.*

6. Create a few new aliases to make the use of the fcd script more efficient. Update or create the file ~/.bash_alias in your home directory and open it with your favorite editor and add the following lines:

alias ++='fcd.py -a "$@"'
alias g='source ~/bin/fcd.sh "$@"'

NOTE: Why g as an alias? Simple, g for (g)oto ;)

Done, logout and login again to make sure all path's and aliases are set correctly.

Ready to peek and poke around

A simple screenshot:

Examples:

$ ++ alias     To add current dir to my list with an associated alias.
$ g alias      To change directory to a entry based on the alias or parts of
               an alias.
$ g            You will be presented with a list of all entries you have saved
               and you could select one from the list based on the alias name.
               Tab completion supported.

If you want to add an extra command after the script have changed directory for you. For example you might want to have a ls - la of the directory this can be done with the command:

$ g -c <command>
or
$ g -c
# And you will be prompted to add the command interactively

For more information type: g -h or g --help

Hope you will enjoy using fcd and it will save some precious time for you.

Other projects at github I found addressing the same use case

• https://github.com/Gyumeijie/dirx
• https://github.com/inwtx/Linux-change-directory-script

Other own previous projects solving the same problems (written in perl)

• https://github.com/torbjornhedqvist/Fast-Change-Directory-fcd-perl